How to make them more important within the game and why people often seem to choose to create entirely single player family trees? I think the answer to the last part of that is simply because it's easier.

This comes out of an idea I mentioned in another thread - how about if, after an initial set of characters you could create when you start playing, all other characters you can create would need to be created through a relationship between one of your characters and a character of another player? Perhaps the other player would even need to tick a box/select a drop down option that says something like, 'allow pregnancy'. What if this were to even be an active choice rather than a passive one? Your character's partner has to request the birth of a child and you must agree.

There are quite a few plus points to a character creation system like this. For a start, it has the potential to greatly reduce spamming the creation of characters by one player, because a second player would essentially have to agree to the creation of a new character either actively or passively depending on the system ("A new child, my dear? How wonderful!" Or, on the other hand, "Not another child, husband. Give me some peace!"). Of course, as with most game mechanics, it would have potential abuses like two players simply forming character relationships to allow creation at will.

A character creation system like this would also encourage players to interact. No longer could you just sit isolated and create all the characters you want. Also, with this system, we might also begin to see some more realistic uses of relationships - marriage alliances between realms; disputed inheritances; etc. Basically, introducing a lot more dynamics to the game.

The trait system was meant to do much the same sort of thing by being a soft push encouraging players to interact to give their characters traits they wanted (for those who don't know, a player gets a certain number of traits within their family/familes and the only way to introduce other traits to your family tree is through relationships with characters of other families). However, since traits have never (yet) been fully enabled they don't work fully as planned. Even fully enabled, I'm not sure they would work as well as this sort of character creation system either.

Thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? Mediocre idea?

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Standing for the responsible use of power since Year 1, Week 1, Day 1.Fun fact: I wrote some of the text for the M&F crowdfunding campaign.Favourite warm beverage: hot chocolate.

How to make them more important within the game and why people often seem to choose to create entirely single player family trees? I think the answer to the last part of that is simply because it's easier.

This comes out of an idea I mentioned in another thread - how about if, after an initial set of characters you could create when you start playing, all other characters you can create would need to be created through a relationship between one of your characters and a character of another player? Perhaps the other player would even need to tick a box/select a drop down option that says something like, 'allow pregnancy'. What if this were to even be an active choice rather than a passive one? Your character's partner has to request the birth of a child and you must agree.

There are quite a few plus points to a character creation system like this. For a start, it has the potential to greatly reduce spamming the creation of characters by one player, because a second player would essentially have to agree to the creation of a new character either actively or passively depending on the system ("A new child, my dear? How wonderful!" Or, on the other hand, "Not another child, husband. Give me some peace!"). Of course, as with most game mechanics, it would have potential abuses like two players simply forming character relationships to allow creation at will.

A character creation system like this would also encourage players to interact. No longer could you just sit isolated and create all the characters you want. Also, with this system, we might also begin to see some more realistic uses of relationships - marriage alliances between realms; disputed inheritances; etc. Basically, introducing a lot more dynamics to the game.

The trait system was meant to do much the same sort of thing by being a soft push encouraging players to interact to give their characters traits they wanted (for those who don't know, a player gets a certain number of traits within their family/familes and the only way to introduce other traits to your family tree is through relationships with characters of other families). However, since traits have never (yet) been fully enabled they don't work fully as planned. Even fully enabled, I'm not sure they would work as well as this sort of character creation system either.

Thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? Mediocre idea?

Fairy Tale online had something like this, all player characters needed to be birthed in game. It also had a several month wait to ever actually start playing the game so probably not a great example. But no I don't support it, mostly because people should be free to engage or not engage in relationships as suits their characters and their personal preferences. Forcing people into something by a mechanic just makes it a chore, it doesn't make it enjoyable or relevant.

Besides which so long as we are allowed multiple paid accounts, you can sort the entire thing yourself if you wanted. Even without that people would just establish OOC links to ensure they had access to new characters.

Sharing heraldry across family lines was an attempt at encouraging players to intermingle their lines, a bit. Mostly, that's targeting the free players, but I'm open to things that encourage intermingling. Sad how few suitors my characters get.

One possible idea is that "roles" could be like a knight's offer. e.g. instead of just manually spawning a child character who is the child of two existing character, you could create an offer to play that character for a new player. e.g. a Knight's offer but you play some noble's son or daughter. Basically, have knight's offers which are tied into the family tree of some other player. Then you could have real "family dramas" unfolding, but it would be optional.

Actually for the whole inter-mingling thing, the game mechanics for free play don't really encourage it very well. To get your 12 towns you need exactly 4 characters each holding three towns. if they're nearby, the most straight-forward thing is to just set them up as a connected family unit, e.g. have a married pair and children. Lots of people would do this because it's just a quick way to get established. Basically, rejigging the character system for free accounts could reduce the amount of that sort of thing.

Another system that could encourage intermingling is some sort of extrinsic rewards system. e.g. have some useless point system that you accumulate "prestige points" that don't actually do anything in the game, however there's a leaderboard that tracks the characters with the most total Prestige, but also the most per month or whatever. The way it would work is that being married to, or having kids, or having vassals from, or being vassal to, different accounts would all be worth Prestige. However, each other account only counts once, and like a pyramid scheme, you get some prestige as well for every character two-links away as well. So, basically all characters have a rating for how well interconnected they are to separate accounts, however this has no actual in-game effect other than that. People love accumulating useless points, it gives them something else to optimize that's not land-grabbing. It might keep more people logging in more often if there's some kind of counter like this, and it gives them a reason to link up with each other.